Vocabulary Comic Books
Through this project, I am taking a research-based approach to teaching English vocabulary to L1 English speakers and college level ELLs through comics. Use of comics is not new to teaching vocabulary, but what's new here is that comics are used much more extensively to provide rich contexts for inferring word meanings and illustrating usage examples. Traditionally, comics have only played a subsidiary role in explaining word meanings and providing usage examples. Word meanings and usage examples have typically been provided through dictionary definitions and example sentences, and comics, if ever used, have been pushed to the margins with a limited use - i.e., single panel comics with simple illustrations that hardly provided rich contexts for students to infer word meanings and usage examples.
Some of the strengths or advantages of using more comics for vocabulary instruction include:
- Its portability - i.e., You can include a large number of vocabulary words in a single comic book, which can easily be carried around and accessed for reference or learning. If digital formats are used, comics can be stored and accessed by using tablets, smartphones, and computers.
- Its ability to provide rich contexts - i.e., Comics afford presenting plots and stories not only verbally, but also both verbally and visually.
- Its tendency to be engaging - i.e., Comics can be more engaging than word-only instructions.
- Its ability to prompt implicit learning - i.e., Not only can comics provide information, they can also create experience, which taps into your personal autobiographic (episodic) memory, and makes it so much easier to remember. The process is similar to how we are naturally exposed to and implicitly acquire new words through everyday social interactions.
Theoretical Frameworks
As the goal of creating comics here is to teach vocabulary effectively, a number of research-based theories, findings, and techniques were put into design and production of comics.
What Words to Use in Comics?
Other than the word students are supposed to learn, each comic story should not contain too many words that are unknown or unfamiliar to the students. As shown in Table 1, when we encounter more than 2 unfamiliar words every 100 words we read, we begin to experience difficulty comprehending the text adequately from context clues (Hu & Nation, 2000).
Of course, these numbers apply to reading pure texts, not comics which are a combination of both texts and pictures. We may need much less text coverage when it comes to comics as pictures can also convey meanings, but we also know that not all pictures are useful (Mayer, 2014) in complementing texts. Unlike vocabulary knowledge, it's difficult to quantify how much picture knowledge we possess. For these reasons, it is much more robust to ensure that unfamiliar words do not exceed 2% of the entire text used in a comic. Then, the question is "How can I ensure the 98% text coverage in comics?"
Typical L1 English speakers at a college level are estimated to know approximately 17,000 English words (Goulden, Nation, & Reed, 1990; D'Anna, Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991; Zechmeister et al., 1995). That is way more than is necessary to attain 98% text coverage in most media such as novels, academic readings, newspapers, movies, TV programs, and conversations as shown in Table 2 (Nation, 2006). In fact, to attain 98% text coverage in most media, you only need to know 6,000-9,000 word families.
This means that comics can contain most of the words found in authentic materials, and that college students will have no problem comprehending the authentic texts adequately. In fact, by the end of Grade 5, children on average are estimated to know over 9,000 English words (Biemiller, 2005) as shown in Table 3. This means that I do not have to deliberately limit word choices if I am creating comics for students in the Grade 6 and above.
Then, how about creating comics for ELLs? ELLs have significantly smaller vocabulary sizes than native English speakers. Many college-level ELLs tend to know 3,000-4,000 English words as shown in Table 4. However, this vocabulary size or the 3,000-4,000 vocabulary range only ensures 95% text coverage in most authentic materials (Nation, 2006) as shown in Table 2. As Hu and Nation (2000) found out, 95% text coverage can only ensure that only a minority of people can gain adequate text comprehension. This means that I will have to use a slightly smaller pool of English words to create vocabulary comics for ELLs. Then, what words should I and should I not use?
Luckily, most of the word lists available today are research-based and provide reasonable yardsticks to ensure the sufficient vocabulary coverage for a variety of groups. In order to design vocabulary comics for college level ELLs, I have decided to only use the words contained in Dale-Chall List or Biemiller List.
- Dale-Chall List (Chall & Dale, 1995): It includes 3,000 words known by students in Grade 4.
- Biemiller List (Biemiller, 1999): It lists 2,300 common root words from Dale-Chall List.
- New General Service List (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013): It includes approximately 2,800 high frequency words that cover 92.34% of the 273 million word Cambridge English Corpus.
- New Academic Word List (Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013): It includes 963 words derived from an academic corpus containing about 288 million words.
Context Building
Context building is essentially storytelling. While there are numerous ways to tell stories, all great stories seem to possess a universal story structure as represented by Freytag's (1900) dramatic arc illustrated below. Paul Zak (2014) discovered that a well-constructed narrative causes a series of physiological responses. According to Zak (2014) this story structure - i.e., character-driven stories with emotional content - causes oxytocin synthesis, which enhances the sense of empathy, our ability to experience others' emotions, which produces the phenomenon called empathic transportation - i.e., you feel what the characters are feeling in the story. This results in a better understanding of the key points a speaker wishes to make and enables better recall of these points weeks later. Zak (2014) explains that to implement the dramatic arc successfully, a story must develop a tension in the exposition and complication stages. Cortisol is associated with tension and helps to sustain attention. Sustained attention is necessary for us to induce oxytocin synthesis and empathic transportation (emotionally transport ourselves into the story).
Not only should stories be able to produce engaging and empathic experience, but also they must be educational, meaning that stories must provide all the context clues necessary for students to derive the meaning and usage of the target vocabulary word. Then, the question is "What context clues are necessary for us to understand the word meaning and usage?"
When we say we know the meaning and usage of a word, it means that we know what the word refers to as well as contexts in which the word may be used - i.e., when and where the word can be used by whom and to whom in what way for what reason. Coincidentally, this largely overlaps with 5W1H (Kipling method).
- Who - Who is saying the word?
- What - What is the word or phrase?
- Where - Where is the person saying the word?
- When - When is the person saying the word?
- Why - Why is the person saying the word
- How - How is the person saying the word?
- To whom - To whom is the person saying the word?
Technical Aspects
Comic Artist
I am the comic artist as I have enough experience with drawing in various styles from realism to cartoon. The key issue here is that my drawing style will have to be engaging enough for students to want to read my comics. To ensure that, I began with a character development.
Drawing Tools
Tablet & Autodesk SketchBookA combination of a tablet and Autodesk SketchBook creates a drawing experience that's comparable to a traditional paper and pen feel. I do all the comic drawing by using my Windows tablet and the SketchBook app.
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MS WordThis is an unorthodox approach. Different from how most professionals draw comics, I don't directly draw pictures on the comic panels. Instead, I do comic drawing for each panel by using the SketchBook app, create pages and their layouts by using MS Word, and plug in the drawn pictures into the comic panels.
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References
- Barrow, J., Nakanishi, Y., & Nishino, H. (1999). Assessing Japanese College Students’ Vocabulary Knowledge with a Self-Checking Familiarity Survey. System, 27(2), 223-247.
- Biemiller, A. (2004). Teaching Vocabulary in the Primary Grades. In J. F. Baumann and E. J. Kame’enui (eds.), Vocabulary Instruction: Research to Practice. New York: Guilford.
- Biemiller, A. (2005). Size and Sequence in Vocabulary Development: Implications for Choosing Words for Primary Grade Vocabulary Instruction. In E. H. Hiebert and M. I. Kamil (eds.), Teaching and Learning Vocabulary: Bridging Research to Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
- D’Anna, C. A., Zechmeister, E. B., & Hall, J. W. (1991). Toward a Meaningful Definition of Vocabulary Size. Journal of Reading Behavior, 23, 109-122.
- Freytag, G. (1900). Freytag's Technique of the Drama (E. J. MacEwan, Trans.). Chicago : Scott, Foresman. [the original version]
- Goulden, R., Nation, P., and Read, J. (1990.) How Large Can a Receptive Vocabulary Be? Applied Linguistics, 11, 341-363.
- Hu, M., & Nation, I.S.P. (2000). Unknown Vocabulary Density and Reading Comprehension. Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(1), 403-430.
- Jamieson, P. (1976). The acquisition of English as a Second Language by Young Tokelau Children Living in New Zealand. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Victoria University of Wellington.
- Laufer, B., & Nation, P. (1999). A vocabulary-size test of controlled productive ability. Language Testing, 16, 33–51.
- Laufer, B., & Yano, Y. (2001). Understanding Unfamiliar Words in a Text: Do L2 Learners Understand How Much They Don’t Understand? Reading in a Foreign Language, 13(2), 549-566. Retrieved December 7, 2015, from http://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/PastIssues/rfl132laufer.pdf
- Mayer, R. E. (Ed.) (2014). The Cambridge handbook of multimedia learning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Milton, J. and Meara, P. (1998). Are the British Really Bad at Learning Foreign Languages? Language Learning
Journal, 18(1), 68-76. doi:10.1080/09571739885200291 - Nation, I. S. P. (2006). How Large a Vocabulary is Needed For Reading and Listening? Canadian Modern Language Review/ La Revue Canadienne Des Langues Vivantes, 63(1), 59–82. http://doi.org/10.3138/cmlr.63.1.59
- Nurweni, A., & Read, J. (1999). The English Vocabulary of Indonesian University Students. English for Specific Purposes, 18, 161-175.
- Shillaw, J. (1995). Using a Word List as a Focus for Vocabulary Learning. The Language Teacher, 19(2), 58-59.
- Webb, S. & Rodgers, M.P.H. (2009a). The Lexical Coverage of Movies. Applied Linguistics, 30(3), pp. 407-427.
- Webb, S. & Rodgers, M.P.H. (2009b). Vocabulary Demands of Television Programmes. Language Learning, 59(2), pp. 335-
366. - Zak, P. J. (2014). Why Your Brain Loves Good Storytelling. Harvard Business Review, Oct. 28. [Digital Version]
- Zechmeister, E. B., Chronis, A. M., Cull, W. L., D’Anna, C. A., & Healy, N. A. (1995). Growth of a Functionally Important
Lexicon. Journal of Reading Behavior, 27(2), 201-212.